My Baby Just Cares for Me
by Mariel Nightstalker
Summary: The Archangel Raphael ends up falling for a human. Of Demons universe spin-off. HET Raphael/Luna


**My Baby Just Cares for Me**

"_To be beloved is all I need, /and whom I love, I love indeed." – Samuel Taylor Coleridge [The Pains of Sleep]_

Did you know that Angels can be punished? There is a gray strip of transgression between what is acceptable for an angel to do and what will cause a condemnation to Hell. For a while there was a holding cell just outside Heaven's Gates, where violators of that gray area were kept, but this proved to do little towards improving the angel's behavior.

Michael was the first to suggest sending disobedient angels, whether willfully or in ignorance of the law, onto Earth for allotted periods of time. This idea was adopted immediately, and the first angel to violate the rules of physical contact with another of their kind was sent to South America. When he returned a week later, he was shaken and gray-faced and promised to never do anything remotely close to wrong ever again.

Their fellow angel's terror did much to improve behavior, and very few had to be punished this way.

Raphael was no ordinary Angel. He was one of the four Archangels, permitted to serve God in a closer capacity than his fellows. He was given charge of regulating human healing, for bettering or detriment, and managed his job very well. That is, he managed very well until he saw a particular patient he'd become fond of sentenced to a lingering and painful death. It was done this way in order to set in motion a series of personal revelations for her loved ones that would help them grow as people. He understood that, really he did, but…he just couldn't bring himself to fill out the command for the virus living in her intestines to ravage her body. He knew he would be punished, but if he filled out a complete outline for her lifetime of health, the system would accept it.

He took special pains to make sure that not even a simple cold would trouble her for the rest of her days, and then signed his name with his usual flourish.

His crime was discovered instantly, and he was sent to Earth for an entire year in a mortal body.

Not knowing what else to do, he tracked down the reason for his exile. She was recovering in the hospital, just as he'd dictated. Blonde and small, she lay on a regulation infirmary bed that dwarfed her. The white sheets made her seem paler than he knew her to be, and made the coloration of her lips stand out starkly. They were pink.

She was unconscious still, deep in her blue-lidded sleep. He came to visit every day for a week, even though he knew she wouldn't wake up until the next Thursday, when her body had won the battle against her virus. He carefully avoided her friends, even ducking into the bathroom at one point to avoid the one with thick brown hair (Hermione or Cymbeline; he couldn't remember which).

"Hello."

He looked up from his human novel, raising his eyebrows to find grey eyes watching him from the bed. She smiled faintly, and asked, "Are you an Angel? You look like one."

He frowned. His body had no signs of the angelic about it. He was lanky, taller than usual, and blonde. He had the correct number of eyes and fingers. At a loss for what had tipped her off, he said, "I beg your pardon?"

She gestured for the water, and he poured her a glass. He wondered if he ought to tell the nurse that she was awake, but decided not to. It wouldn't help or hurt.

"My name's Raphael, by the way," he volunteered, supporting her neck as she drank.

"Like the Angel," she shrewdly pointed out. He sighed.

"I'm not an Angel, Miss Lovegood."

She gave him one of the coy, knowing looks that had turned her into his favorite; it was a look too old for her age that often put her peers ill at ease. He smiled at the sight of it, not used to seeing it in person. She smiled and reached out for his hand.

"How do you know my name?"

He was at a loss. It hadn't crossed his mind that he would need an explanation for how he knew her. He wasn't used to the way human society functioned. In Heaven everyone knew everyone else; it was a side effect of being born together and spending eternity on the same plane of existence. In a way they were all brothers and sisters, children of their maker.

He altered the truth.

"I…I saw it on the register. I was here to visit a friend, but he was moved to another hospital. My bus wasn't going to arrive for another hour, so I looked for someone interesting to visit. Your name caught my eye, and I guess I got in the habit of coming here to sit with you, to have some time to myself."

The skin at the creases of her eyes clenched and then released. He knew she didn't believe him, that strange intuition of her revealing his lie. But she didn't say anything more about it. She asked him what he did for work, what he liked to do when she was asleep. He asked her if she was a student, and couldn't help but laugh at the prim way she denied it and stated her profession as a research assistant.

He ended up meeting her friends, who accepted him with raised eyebrows and skepticism but kept their doubts to themselves. None of them wanted to upset her after her stint at the hospital.

They ended up at lunch together several times a week. He found employment at a book store, and she found an excuse to come and peruse their psychology section most evenings just before he got off his shift, whereupon he would invite her to coffee or just for a walk around town.

He wasn't expecting her to declare him her boyfriend, but he wasn't going to complain. Their relationship wasn't physical. It was more of a mutual understanding, marked with held hands and a chaste peck on the cheek every once and a while. He made no move to alter this state of affairs, seeing as it was forbidden to mate with humans.

The only thing he thought about that put a damper on his happy life was what to do when his last eight months on earth ended and he would be allowed back in Heaven.

He didn't want to go back just yet. He wanted to stay here, with her.

And in a fit of weakness, three days before he was due to leave, he told her everything. She accepted it with her usual aplomb as he expected she would. And then she said that there was only one way to fix this.

He found himself lying on his back in her bedroom, watching with apprehension as she strolled around in her eyelet night dress putting her things in order. She hummed as she folded her skirts and lined up her shoes.

She threw a glance over her shoulder to see if he was still tense as a bowstring and, finding him unchanged, said, "Oh poor you; forced to have sex with your girlfriend."

He scowled. She put her arms akimbo and told him to relax. He tried and failed. She sidled over and sat astride him, starting up her humming again. Not knowing what to do, he remained limp with hands folded on his stomach. Fortunately for both of them, his body wasn't uneducated in what it was meant to do under such circumstances and rose to the occasion.

Long embarrassingly pleasurable story short, he was ordered to remain on earth until the mortal body he occupied shriveled into dust.

Luna proposed to him the moment he returned from the heavenly courts.

~000~

End My Baby Just Cares for Me

This could be considered a spin-off from the Of Demons universe.


End file.
